As the novel opens, eighty-four-year-old Nikolai tells his daughters that he has fallen in love and is going to get married. The object of his affection is Valentina, an illegal immigrant from Ukraine whose main appeal appears to be her youth (she is thirty-six years old), her dyed-blonde hair, and her enormous, voluptuous breasts. Were your parents, like Nadia's, reluctant to discuss their past, particularly wartime events? How well informed were you about life in A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is your first novel. Do you have plans to write more fiction? Will you write more course it was a situation that I had come across in my work on elder care, not just old men falling for unscrupulous young women, but also old

As a work of literature 'Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' suffers from what is perhaps a typical fault of many at least partially autobiographical debut: too much crammed into little space, too many stories in one and not many of them very well explored.brought together by their father's apparent second adolescence, they conspire to oust the newcomer and preserve the sanctity of their mother's Bestselling author Marina Lewkyca has received great critical acclaim since the publication of her hilarious first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainianin 2005, which was the winner of the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction 2005, winner of the Saga Award for Wit 2005, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2005 and longlisted for the Booker prize 2005. Her other humorous novels Two Caravans(published as Strawberry Fieldsin the USA and Canada), We Are All Made of Glueand Various Pets Alive and Deadare also available from Penguin. Maybe he would beat her if he could, but he cannot. For the first time he realises how helpless he is. His heart fills with despair. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian made the Booker longlist for 2005, which is quite a feat for a debut novel - and one of the two reasons why I chose to read it. The other one is, of course, its quirky title - I just couldn't pass a book titled like that, even though I profess absolutely no knowledge of even the most rudimentary Ukrainian. My knowledge of tractors is not much better - I'm able to identify one when I see it, but that's pretty much it.

Captures the peculiar flavour of Eastern European immigrant life . . . a very rich mixture indeed' Daily Express I fell in love with Valentina. Her sheer energy and vitality, her magnificent awfulness stole my heart - and my novel. That's what he is writing, a short history of tractors. In Ukrainian. Eighty-four years old, an engineer, a chess player and a father of two daughters, he had been recently widowed. Now he decides to marry a 36-year-old blonde Ukrainian divorcee with a teenage son and a pair of superior breasts. He knows that she wants to marry him only for his money and so that she and her son can make permanent their stay in England (where he and his family had migrated a long time ago) but he looks at her golden hair, charming eyes, curves and jiggling breasts and say "so what?" His two grownup daughters, born ten years apart, and have been feuding ever since, have temporarily united against this common enemy aptly named Valentina.based on the stories my mother told me about her childhood. To me, the country was always like the 'blue remembered hills', a place of mythical beauty. For example, the eighty-four-year-old Nikolai, a former engineer with seventeen patents and intellectual interests, has apparently been watching too much television and has bought into the flesh market of the sexual revolution. As he says, “Snag is, hydraulic lift no longer fully functioning. But maybe with Valentina . . . ” He is transfixed by Valentina’s breasts, which she lets him fondle (though later she will not let her new baby breast-feed). If his hydraulic lift malfunctions, Valentina says, “Squishy squashy husband want make oralsex.” Oral sex is recommended by Mrs. Zadchuk, Valentina’s friend, as a legally binding way of consummating the marriage. According to Mrs. Zadchuk, oral sex is all the rage in England and in all the newspapers.